When Robots Meet Appliances
A New Design Scenario
At IFA 2025, humanoid robots stopped being a futuristic curiosity. We saw them moving among visitors, offering services, shaking hands, and capturing attention. Robotics is no longer confined to laboratories—it is beginning to enter the realm of everyday life.
For product designers, the inevitable question is: what will happen when these robots truly enter our homes?
Are they ready to interact with our appliances? Or will appliances have to adapt to them?
From Isolated Products to Interactive Systems
Until now, appliances have been conceived as autonomous objects, with their own interfaces designed for direct interaction with users. But if the primary interlocutor is no longer a person, but a machine capable of interpreting commands and moving in space, the design logic changes radically.
Recent research confirms that this is no longer speculation but an active field of development. The ApBot project (2025) demonstrates how a robot can “read” appliance user manuals and learn to operate them without requiring special design adaptations, thanks to advanced vision-language models arxiv.org.
Multimodality and IoT: New Interfaces for the Home
The challenge is not only hardware. Interaction also requires multimodal communication: voice, gestures, touch, and even visual recognition. A recent study on domestic service systems SpringerLink highlights how the real challenge is designing interfaces that enable both robots and smart devices to interpret multiple input modes.
At the same time, the convergence of robotics and IoT is reshaping the smart home. Robots are no longer isolated actors, but nodes integrated into networks of sensors, connected appliances, and environmental systems. As noted by automate.org, this synergy fosters not only automation but also energy efficiency and adaptive living experiences.
From the “Social Appliance” to the Design of Coexistence
Some research even explores the more “human” side of this interaction. A curious study on the robotic toaster as a domestic social robot ResearchGate shows how even a simple object can be reimagined to embody behavior and presence, turning interaction into an almost social experience.
This broadens the reflection: design is not only about form, but about defining the rules of coexistence between systems. Adaptive appliances, robots as interpreters, shared interaction standards—all converge toward a home where objects no longer operate in isolation but speak a common language.
Challenges for Industrial Design
The shift from autonomous products to interactive systems introduces several challenges:
Standardization: defining common protocols that enable communication between robots and appliances.
Accessibility: ensuring that robot-mediated interaction remains safe and understandable for users.
User experience: embedding empathy, identity, and values to make human-robot-object coexistence natural.
Ethics and privacy: balancing comfort and efficiency with data protection and social responsibility.
IFA demonstrated that the future will not be made of isolated objects, but of systems in dialogue.
For designers, true innovation will not lie solely in the performance of a single product, but in its ability to speak the same language as the new intelligences entering our living spaces.
